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"FacebookPinterest\n\nBy the time you finish Philip Roth&amp;#39;s suffocated, suffocating, mostly uninspired and entirely necessary new novel, Exit Ghost, you&amp;#39;ll feel like a total heel. All the more so if you&amp;#39;re a longtime fan of Philip Roth&amp;#39;s fiction. Because if you&amp;#39;re a fan of Philip Roth&amp;#39;s fiction, you&amp;#39;re no doubt mesmerized by Roth himself\u2014and specifically, the Promethean wonder of his last decade and a half. In the mid&amp;#39;90s, as Roth neared retirement age and seemed to be vanishing as a vital voice in the culture, he literally vanished. Banished himself, Salingerlike, to solitude in a New England cottage, apparently done with it all\u2014interviews, wives, fame, the world entire. At the time, the disappearance seemed of a piece with the work that preceded and coincided with it; Patrimony and Operation Shylock were remarkable books but inward and idiosyncratic, limited in scope, neither one a Zeitgeistdevouring monster. But then, as soon as Roth checked out, the masterpieces began to emerge. Methodically, every other year, beginning in &amp;#39;95 with Sabbath&amp;#39;s Theater\u2014virile, vital novels that were utterly and paradoxically of the world.\n\nHow&amp;#39;d he do it\n\nPhilip Roth, that man you venerate, wants to slap your face for asking that question. Excuse me\u2014Nathan Zuckerman, the hero of Exit Ghost, the ninth and, we&amp;#39;re told, last of Roth&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Zuckerman&amp;quot; books, is the one who wants to lay you out. You know Zuckerman, the hero Roth created in his own image Newark Jew; great American novelist, scandalously sexual both in his pages and in his &amp;quot;real life&amp;quot;; now a septuagenarian survivor of prostate cancer, no longer the cocksman; a man who&amp;#39;s spent the eleven years prior to 2004 holed up in a New England cottage, writing, writing, writing\u2026\n\nThing is, Zuckerman knows you, too. For a while he took his eye off his navel in order to take in the big vistas Vietnam&amp;#39;s and the Cold War&amp;#39;s scars on the national psyche (1997&amp;#39;s American Pastoral and 1998&amp;#39;s I Married a Communist, respectively); sexual and racial politics in the wake of Monica (2000&amp;#39;s The Human Stain). But now Zuckerman&amp;#39;s lowered his gaze again, and he&amp;#39;s got his eyes not only on himself but on you. He&amp;#39;s onto your efforts to make something of the fact that each of his abovementioned biographical details happens to apply to Philip Roth. And throughout Exit Ghost, Zuckerman tells you in no uncertain terms You&amp;#39;re a cretin, a literalist who comprehends fiction as an act of confession rather than imagination and who &amp;quot;attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.&amp;quot; You&amp;#39;ve got to cut it out.\n\nYet you can&amp;#39;t. You&amp;#39;re only human. And Roth\u2014er, Zuckerman\u2014admits as much about a hundred pages into Exit Ghost.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s the day after the &amp;quot;imbecilic king&amp;quot; (George W. Bush) has won reelection. Zuckerman has returned to New York for the first time in eleven years, for medical treatments he consciously hopes will cure his leaky bladder and unconsciously hopes will cure his increasingly leaky mind. Zuckerman, we soon learn, has never felt more brittle, more bound. He can feel his wings\u2014the prodigious twin powers of his memory and his concentration\u2014melting away on a daily basis. Cast once more into the vast zoo of stimulations that is Manhattan, he finds his leaky bladder is the least of his worries; he starts spilling out of himself in all sorts of ways he can&amp;#39;t control. These spills are due mainly to two young writers who reanimate, instantly and respectively, the lust and rage that, like his dick, Zuckerman has long presumed dead. In Jamie Logan, he finds himself gazing at a married woman he must seduce. (Roth novel, remember) In Richard Kliman, he finds himself gazing at something even more provocative a malignant clone of his younger self, &amp;quot;a literary lunatic\u2026like me\u2026whose most violent passion is for a book.&amp;quot; Kliman&amp;#39;s no novelist, though, but a &amp;quot;cultural journalist&amp;quot;\u2014the kind of guy, in other words, who&amp;#39;d surely peg Zuckerman as &amp;quot;the hero Roth created in his own image&amp;quot; and find that the central &amp;quot;fact&amp;quot; of the Zuckerman novels. What&amp;#39;s more, Kliman&amp;#39;s planning a literary biography of a dead, allbutforgotten writer Zuckerman once knew and still reveres\u2014a man named I. E. Lonoff whose dark &amp;quot;great secret&amp;quot; is revealed, Kliman claims, in an unpublished fiction manuscript. Kliman haughtily demands Zuckerman&amp;#39;s imprimatur and cooperation; Zuckerman instead sets out to crush Kliman and his book, knowing full well\u2014as well as he knows the back of his own hand\u2014that men like Kliman create their own reality and that the world will always yield to such men. \n\nWhen Zuckerman phones the younger man to set up a showdown, Kliman, assuming a buddy&amp;#39;s calling to commiserate about the election, picks up the receiver and says, &amp;quot;Caligula wins.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;So it seems,&amp;quot; comes the response. &amp;quot;But this is Zuckerman.&amp;quot;\n\nSo densely Rothian, that exchange, the way the facing mirrors of selfinspection generate a seeming infinity of references and meanings. Point conceded, then He is Zuckerman and you and I, sniffing about his feet for clues to Philip Roth&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;great secret,&amp;quot; are Caligula Imbecile King of Literature. (Favorite alltime story &amp;quot;The Pet Goat.&amp;quot;)\n\nStill, I, Caligula, will give a silver dollar to any man, woman, or child who can read this choice passage from Exit Ghost in which Zuckerman mentally sizes up his doppelg\u00E4nger/nemesis\u2026\n\nI do know you. You&amp;#39;re young and you&amp;#39;re handsome and nothing gives you more assurance than being devious too. You have a taste for deviousness. It&amp;#39;s another of your entitlements to do harm should you want to. And, strictly speaking, it&amp;#39;s not harm that you do\u2014merely the fulfilling of a right you would be a fool to relinquish. I know you you wish to gain the approval of the adults you clandestinely set about to defile. There&amp;#39;s a cunning pleasure in that, and safety too.\n\n\u2026and not think of the exuberant transgressions (Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy&amp;#39;s Complaint) with which the young, handsome Philip Roth brashly kicked off his singular career.\n\nThe same goes for two terrific backtoback rants toward the end of Exit Ghost. The first spits on the &amp;quot;politically correct&amp;quot; aesthetics that have in recent decades elevated &amp;quot;Gertrude Stein [over] Ernest Hemingway [and] Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison [over] Faulkner.&amp;quot; The second, which informs the book&amp;#39;s title, spits on that brand of inquiry that&amp;#39;s more interested in the backgrounds and loves and foibles of famous novelists than fiction itself.\n\nThe way in which serious fiction eludes paraphrase\u2026hence requiring thought\u2026is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that fiction, the lazy journalist&amp;#39;s fiction\u2026. Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era.\n\nCuriously, both rants come not from Zuckerman but from Lonoff&amp;#39;s former mistress, a woman disinhibited and somewhat deranged by a brain tumor\u2014an unreliable narrator if there ever was one. It&amp;#39;s mindboggling Roth using Zuckerman using a woman who can&amp;#39;t be held accountable for anything she says to bitchslap anyone who might find Philip Roth as compelling a figure as Nathan Zuckerman, or, God forbid, draw parallels between the two\u2014in a book whose premise, whose very existence, all but demands it. One can&amp;#39;t help thinking of Roth as the literary equivalent of that merciless tease, Mango, the selfcaressing gogo monkey from Saturday Night Live who repeatedly lures his admirers to the cusp of erotic oneness with their object d&amp;#39;amour\u2014only to abuse them with such taunts as &amp;quot;Can you know the mighty ocean! Can you lasso a star from the sky! NO! Such is Mango!&amp;quot;\n\nLook, I&amp;#39;m deeply grateful to Philip Roth. The work, the author, the man\u2026whatever. It&amp;#39;s a gratitude I can&amp;#39;t and won&amp;#39;t distinguish from love. I know I&amp;#39;m not alone. Like countless readers (mostly men, I imagine), I&amp;#39;ve often come away from his pages feeling I&amp;#39;ve just been given an Xray of my own soul. I think Sabbath&amp;#39;s Theater grasps better than any other book in the English language what it is to be male and to desire; it&amp;#39;s both a far more pure and far more filthy book than Lolita. (Interestingly, Kliman touts Lonoff&amp;#39;s unpublished manuscript to Zuckerman as &amp;quot;Lolita without Quilty and the stupid jokes.&amp;quot;) Unfortunately, in Exit Ghost, Roth/Zuckerman never manages to convey male want (the septuagenarian kind, any kind) intrinsically by tapping the thirdrail power of his and every male reader&amp;#39;s id. (Think of the scene, as preposterous as it is repugnant as it is moving a it is inexplicably familiar, in which a despondent and uncomprehending Mickey Sabbath licks his fingers clean of the sperm of another man who&amp;#39;s just masturbated on the grave of their mutual exlover, Drenka.) Instead, Roth goes about it referentially, describing, for example, what Jamie is wearing (repeatedly and at great length). We&amp;#39;re expected to take on faith that she&amp;#39;s just as beddable as all those ingenues from past Roth novels.\n\nWhat else Well, in addition to the fact that Exit&amp;#39;s plot hinges on several clunky coincidences, Zuckerman keeps returning to his hotel room to pen feverish fantasy dialogues between &amp;quot;HE&amp;quot; (Zuckerman) and &amp;quot;SHE&amp;quot; (Jamie) in which we&amp;#39;re treated to such dopey stuff as, &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s a sickness. It&amp;#39;s a fever. It&amp;#39;s a kind of hypnosis. I can only explain it by saying that I want to be alone in a room with you. I want to be under your spell.&amp;quot; Zuckerman notes that these dialogues are &amp;quot;more affecting even than the conversations we do have, and the imaginary &amp;#39;She&amp;#39; vividly at the middle of her character as the actual &amp;#39;she&amp;#39; will never be.&amp;quot; But it&amp;#39;s just not so\u2014both &amp;quot;She&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; are stagy, mechanical presences who never even touch the outside of their characters, much less their middles. As a result, Zuckerman&amp;#39;s erotic longing feels obligatory, oddly uninhabited. And numbingly repetitive. After enduring one too many banal professions\u2014&amp;quot;She had a huge pull on me&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;I was so blinded by her appeal&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m crazy about you&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;I feel you can teach me something that it&amp;#39;s too late for me to learn&amp;quot;\u2014one starts to wonder whether Roth isn&amp;#39;t trying to convince himself that Zuckerman&amp;#39;s despair is muscular and urgent, rather than just melancholic. Even Roth&amp;#39;s research feels clunky. When the &amp;quot;Swede&amp;quot; in American Pastoral lovingly explained the intricacies to Rita Cohen of his glovemaking business, each new detail allowed us to peer that much MORE deeply into his soul. When Jamie&amp;#39;s husband explains the details of his family&amp;#39;s retailluggage business in Exit Ghost, one feels nothing and merely thinks &amp;quot;Huh, I guess Roth did some research about the luggage business.&amp;quot; And while I&amp;#39;m at it How can a writer with Roth&amp;#39;s taste and precision allow Zuckerman to note, correctly enough, that &amp;quot;There is no situation that infatuation is unable to feed on&amp;quot;\u2014and then, in the very next sentence, drop this melodramatic turd &amp;quot;I allowed her into my eyes the way a sword swallower swallows a sword&amp;quot;\n\nThe problem with Exit Ghost is that you keep noticing its gaffes, which means it never puts you in that mentally slippy place any good novels puts you, where you stop thinking about the ingenuity of the author, about mechanics. Which is deadly in a book that (1) is about writers and writing and (2) repeatedly and belligerently instructs its readers not to think of its hero as a proxy for the author. I mean, c&amp;#39;mon\u2014are we really supposed to believe that Zuckerman is such a Rip Van Winkle that he&amp;#39;s never heard of Tom Cruise or the World Wide Web Or, more outlandishly, that he&amp;#39;s unaware of the death, a year before, of his old friend George Plimpton, who in the &amp;#39;50s published in &amp;quot;his new literary quarterly&amp;quot; the short stories of Zuckerman&amp;#39;s that no one else would touch\n\nSo do I like Exit Ghost No. It&amp;#39;s flawed, repetitive, and unremittingly unpleasant\u2014less Zuckerman&amp;#39;s Grand Adieu than his Grand Fuck You. But who cares if it&amp;#39;s likable Roth at his worst is still interesting and, often, inevitable. One may have to wade 64 pages into Exit Ghost to get to it, but then there it is, the stuff you can&amp;#39;t get anywhere else, one of those deeply pleasing Rothian riffs where the power of his perception seems superhuman, alien\u2014even as he&amp;#39;s bringing us news about ourselves and our world that, in some subterranean, collective way, we already know to be true. Disinhibition in all its forms has always been Roth&amp;#39;s great subject, and in this particular set piece, Zuckerman marvels at the endless stream of New Yorkers yapping away on their cell phones as they stroll Upper Broadway.\n\nFor me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect\u2026you know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can&amp;#39;t, you get impatient\u2014impatient and angry like a little stupid god.\n\nOn its own, the riff amazes and nourishes. A little stupid god\u2014yes! Yet Roth, being Roth, takes it to a stranger, more challenging place, with Zuckerman drawing a straight line between the ruthless selfexposure of all those yapping cellphone clowns and the equally ruthless selfexposure\u2014all those bared bellies and butts\u2014of the women he sees on the streets of New York.\n\nBetter still is the way the &amp;quot;news&amp;quot; of George Plimpton&amp;#39;s demise sets up a riff that on its own is more than worth the price of admission. It&amp;#39;s an exhilarating fifteenpage meditation not on Plimpton per se but on Plimptons on one hand, the urbane &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; Plimpton assumed in his Paris Review mode, and on the other the bumbling &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; of the participatory sports journalism, repeatedly knocked on his ass by professional bors and football players.\n\nSocial class\u2026seemed to me the deepest inspiration for his writing\u2026about sports, cagily venturing into situations where he plays at being bereft of his class advantages (except for the uppercrust manners, which, in a world wholly alien, if not hostile, to good breeding, he knowingly employs for the comic effect of their unsuitability). &amp;quot;Me&amp;quot; is his selfmocking double\u2014the working journalist\u2014unburdened of the privileged George that he inescapably was\u2026. Courting embarrassment and losing his dignity and flaunting his inadequacies with the pros, George in fact succeeded in maximizing his glamour rather than repudiating it, a ploy for which I admired him and that was at the heart of my enjoyment of his books.\n\nWhat a feast, that passage! Here we get the famous literary lion Philip Roth&amp;#39;s famous literary doppelg\u00E4nger, Nathan Zuckerman, brilliantly dissecting the famous literary lion George Plimpton&amp;#39;s famous literary doppelg\u00E4ngers, reminding us as he does how weary he, Zuckerman, has become of the &amp;quot;stale labor&amp;quot; of &amp;quot;having either to endlessly enact the role of myself or to parry fantasies of the author extrapolated from fiction by the most naive readers.&amp;quot; Amazing on its own, this loving, angry aria. But that it comes toward the end of a novel decrying the vulgarian unimaginativeness of those who would draw conclusions about novelists based on the characters they create\u2014it&amp;#39;s the kind of hypnotic seductioncumstinging rejection an amateur like Mango could only dream about."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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